A New Index About the Walker Circulation

Abstract

The Walker circulation (WC) has always been an important issue in atmospheric science research due to the association between the WC and tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST), and between the WC and ENSO events. In this paper, a new index-Omega index (OMGI)-is constructed for WC characterization based on the NCEP /NCAR reanalysis data of monthly mean vertical velocity in recent 70 years (1948-2017). Results show that the OMGI can accurately depict the variation characteristics of WC on seasonal, annual and decadal time-scales. There is a significant inverse correlation between the OMGI and equatorial eastern and central Pacific SST. Meanwhile, the peak of the OMGI appears ahead of the ENSO peak, and therefore is able to reflect the SST in the equatorial Pacific. Especially, in 35 ENSO events, the peak of the OMGI appears earlier than Nino 3.4 index for 19 times with 2.6 months ahead on average. In 16 El Nino events, the peak of the OMGI occurs ahead of the El Nino for 9 times with 4 months ahead on average. In 19 La Nina events, the OMGI peak arises 10 times earlier than the La Nina peak, with an average of 1.4 months ahead. OMGI shows obvious leading effect and stability over ENSO events with different strengths and types of single peak and multi peaks: the peak of the OMGI keeps about 2-3 months ahead of the ENSO. Compared with other WC indexes such as UWI and SPLI, OMGI has some advantages in the ability to describe WC changes and present the probability and the time of prediction of ENSO event peaks.